WeeklyWorker

09.04.2026
Copenhagen 1910: Alexandra Kollontai and Clara Zetkin (centre right). Who else do you recognise?

Not a clean, but a dirty split

The standard left narrative of the 1914-21 schism in the Second International is misleading and nowadays too easily leads to irresponsible splits. Mike Macnair argues for historical complication

On Monday March 30 I spoke together with Ian Spencer (of the Democratic Socialists of Your Party) and Tony Collins (author of Raising the Red Flag) at a meeting organised by the Bolshevik Caucus of Your Party on the topic of ‘Considering cross-class coalitions: history and theory’.

Our titles were given to us by the organisers: comrade Spencer’s was ‘Millerand: socialists in capitalist governments’ on Alexandre Millerand and the debate sparked by his becoming a minister in the 1899 coalition ‘government of republican defence’. Comrade Collins’ was ‘Separating Labour from the Liberals’, on the origins of the Labour Party and the relations of British leftists to it in 1900-1918. Mine was ‘Separating communism from social democracy’, on the split in the Second International. Each of us spoke for 15 minutes, followed by brief discussion of three-minute contributions and a four-minute reply. This was not, in fact, a good way of getting into depth on any of the subjects, though in the event few people wanted to speak from the floor.

This article is primarily an expanded write-up of my talk. But it is worth beginning with a point about the titles. ‘Separating Labour from the Liberals’ and ‘Separating communism from social democracy’ both contain the implication that the primary task is an organisational split, organisational separation. But in fact comrade Collins’ presentation made clear that the formal organisational separation created by the Labour Representation Committee and the creation of the Parliamentary Labour Party did not in any sense entail the political independence of the Labour party from the Liberal Party.

The converse point is much less obvious, because standard far-left narrative tells us that Bolshevism and Menshevism were separate parties from 1903, or from 1912, The reality is that they were politically independent factions (with their own publications, organisational forms, etc) within a common party identification - the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Siberian Social Democrats continued common action down to October 1917 (if they had not done so, Petrograd would have been starved out in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution).1 The existence of public organised factions of the RSDLP allowed political independence from pro-capitalist politics without full organisational separation.

Political dependence

We should be conscious of this in relation to the modern left. The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Workers Party are both organisationally separate from the Labour Party. But their political projects have the effect that they are politically dependent on the Labour and trade union ‘official’ lefts. The Socialist Party in England and Wales seeks explicitly to recreate a new Labour Party based on the trade unions. However much such a party sought to be more leftwing, its dependence on trade union affiliations would inevitably give it the same political character as the existing Labour Party: an instrument for bargaining with the state to slow down capitalist attacks, on the basis of offering loyalist support for the British state, its constitution and its foreign policy.

There is a standard far-left narrative of the split in the Second International. This narrative is that the Second International aimed to build ‘parties of the whole class’. As a result, these parties included both ‘revolutionaries’ like Lenin and his co-thinkers, Rosa Luxemburg and hers, and ‘reformists’ like Georg von Vollmar, Eduard Bernstein, and their co-thinkers. The ‘centre’ defined by Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and others sought to maintain this unity and as a result to evade the necessary choice between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’. This produced a politics of ‘attentism’ - waiting for a revolutionary crisis that would be generated by capitalism itself. The result was the capture of the party by the ‘reformists’ - shown by the failure to escalate the Prussian suffrage campaign of 1910 to the general strike.

This, in turn, led to the collapse of the International in August 1914, as the national parties (mainly) fell in behind their own bourgeoisie. Lenin and the Bolsheviks “raised the flag of the new International” in 1914 (to quote comrade Collins’ version of the standard story in an intervention from the floor in my part of the discussion). A very small opposition appeared at the Zimmerwald (September 1915) and Kienthal (April 1916) conferences of anti-war socialists, but with the later part of the war and the Russian Revolution these marginal groups leapt to mass leadership, creating the conditions for the creation of the Communist International in March 1919. The 1984 Pathfinder Press collection of documents edited by John Riddell, Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary international, emphasises in its title (and to some extent in the choice of documents) the personal role of Lenin in the struggle for the split: a feature of the standard narrative more generally.

What my talk set out to do and this article aims to do is not to abolish the standard narrative: in contrast to Eurocommunist Fernando Claudin’s The Communist movement: from Comintern to Cominform, which argued that the split was a sectarian error.2 It seems to me perfectly clear from the course of events since Claudin wrote that the split between, on the one hand, communists and, on the other hand, constitutional and national loyalists (who appropriated the name ‘social democrats’) was, in fact, necessary.

First, because the ‘social democrats’ would never accept communists winning a majority (as in France in 1920), or, indeed, communists having freedom to speak and organise within ‘broad united parties’ (as in the British Labour Party from 1920 on).

Second, silence of the communists for the sake of unity achieves nothing. This is, first, because the constitutional- and national-loyalist policy of the ‘social democrats’ involved socialists accepting political responsibility for barbarism - in the form of both colonialism and inter-imperialist wars. And, second, in domestic politics it set radical limits to socialisation, and left the fundamental levers of political power in the hands of the bribe-paying classes. Since the end of the cold war, this has meant that the loyalist socialist parties at best merely delaying the capitalists’ class war on the working class, without ever actually turning back this class war.

So the split in the Second International was justified and cannot now be reversed. But I aim to complicate the standard narrative, in three ways. The first is that that the Second International was never engaged in building ‘parties of the whole class’, and the argument that this policy drove the International’s failure in 1914 is false. The second is that this 1914 failure is a story more complicated than the simple victory of the ‘reformists’. The third is that the split was, and had to be, a ‘dirty split’, not a clean one.

1889

The Second International was founded in 1889 - in a split, with two rival international congresses taking place simultaneously. The ‘Possibilist’ congress was backed by the French ‘Possibilist’ socialists, who argued against the French ‘Marxists’ that the adoption of a minimum programme (the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier) tended to separate the socialist movement from the real mass class movement. It was also backed by the British Trade Union Congress general council. The decisive immediate split decision was that the ‘Possibilists’ demanded legal verification of membership numbers, which was impossible for the illegal German socialists (the 1890 legalisation of the German socialists as the Social Democratic Party of Germany made it clear that the insinuation that the Germans were overstating their numbers was false).3

Modern far-left advocates of ‘broad front’ parties would no doubt have preferred the ‘Possibilist’ congress over the ‘Marxist’ one. All the more advocates of a ‘party of the whole class’ would have preferred that option.

At Zurich in 1893 the International, on the motion of August Bebel and Karl Kautsky (Germany), Victor Adler (Austria) and Otto Lang (Switzerland), voted that future participation should require ‘recognition of political action’ - explained as “the workers’ parties should make full use of political and legal rights in an attempt to capture the legislative machine and use it for the interests of the working class and for the capture of political power”: this was to exclude ‘anti-electoralist’ political groups. The issue was brought back to the London congress of 1896, where the TUC GC was hosting the congress, and anarchists still received invites; Keir Hardie (Independent Labour Party) and Tom Mann (delegated from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers) argued for broad unity without political pre-conditions.4 The congress nonetheless voted, on Wilhelm Liebknecht’s motion on behalf of the Standing Orders Committee:

The Standing Orders Committee of the Congress is entrusted with the duty of drawing up the invitation for the next congress by appealing exclusively to:

1. The representatives of those organisations that seek to substitute socialist property and production for capitalist property and production, and which consider legislative and parliamentary action as one of the necessary means of attaining that end.

2. Purely trade [union] organisations, which, though taking no militant part in politics, declare that they recognise the necessity of legislative and parliamentary action; consequently anarchists are excluded …5

Far from being a ‘party of the whole class’, this was an international formed on the basis of a definite political project; and one which most of the modern far left would consider to be ultra-left: seeking the replacement of capitalism with socialism. The TUC’s enthusiasm for ‘breadth’ to include the anarchists was, in reality, an instrumental device to support the TUC’s intimate relations with the Liberal Party.

Materials from the congresses of the Second International are available in Mike Taber’s 2021 Under the socialist banner and his Reform, revolution and opportunism: debates in the Second International, 1900-19106 - both available in paperback at very reasonable prices. For those who cannot afford these, but have web access, a good deal of the above is on Marxists Internet Archive.7 It does not take long looking at these to be clear that, in spite of the presence of a substantial right wing, the International’s debates and decisions were predominantly those of an organisation seriously seeking the overthrow of capitalism.

1914

In the standard narrative, the story of August 1914 is simple. The reformists, because they were reformists, displayed loyalty to their nation-states. The left opposed the war; but the ‘centrists’ clung to unity with the right; Lenin fought, almost alone, for a clean split with the right.

This story needs to be complicated in several ways. In the first place, some traditional leaders of the non- or anti-Marxist right wing of the workers’ movement opposed the war. For example, in France, Jean Jaurès, who had backed Millerand’s entry into government, was assassinated on July 31 1914 for agitating for a general strike to stop the war.8 In Germany, the prominent revisionist leader Eduard Bernstein became an opponent of the war.9 In Britain Ramsay Macdonald opposed the war and was, as a result, forced out as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party (he continued to oppose the war, was witch-hunted and lost his parliamentary seat in 1918).10

Conversely, significant leaders of the pre-war left wing of the movement actually adopted pro-war positions. For example, again, Italian revolutionary syndicalist leaders Benito Mussolini and Arturo Labriola became advocates of Italian entry into the war on the Entente side (and after the war they became fascists!).11 In Germany, a group of former radical leftists and anti-imperialist writers became advocates of German victory as the most progressive outcome. They were led by Parvus (who had worked with Trotsky on the theory of permanent revolution in 1904-05), who was himself drawn to supporting German victory through the idea that this would allow Turkey to escape from Anglo-French control, also arguing that it would promote Ukrainian independence from Russia.12

Karl Kautsky initially argued for the SPD to make the vote for war credits conditional on defensive-only war aims.13 In 1917, however, he went over to open defence of the Entente justification of the war: the right to self-determination of Serbia and of Belgium.14 It was this Entente ‘victoryism’ that led him to oppose the October revolution. After the war, he became a publicist for German ‘war guilt’.15

If we ask why the story has to be complicated in this way, the answer is that the ‘war guilt’ problem is not as simple as it seems. The standard left narrative is that World War I was a war between predatory, monopolistic (oligopolistic) imperialist states for the redivision of the world. This character subordinated the questions of the self-determination of Serbia and of Belgium (which left supporters of the Entente used to justify their line) and of national self-defence (which left supporters of the Central Powers used to justify theirs).

It is nonetheless true that Austria-Hungary did invade Serbia, using a justification that would now be called ‘harbouring terrorists’ and ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ (when the USA or Israel use such arguments). And it is nonetheless true that Russia and France did invade Germany in August 1914: we merely forget the fact due to the radical military failure of these invasions. And in 1916 Lenin argued, against Luxemburg and the so-called ‘imperialist economists’, that national self-determination was not wholly subordinated to the inter-imperialist war - in the case of the Dublin Easter Rising.

On the other hand, the Die Glocke group argued that the underlying cause of the war was Britain’s attempt to hold on to global supremacy in spite of the (relative) decline of its productive industry. This is a partial truth which should become more visible today in the light of the very similar policy of aggressive encirclement the USA is pursuing towards China, as Britain pursued towards Germany in 1900-14.16

My point is not that the characterisation of the war as an inter-imperialist war for the redivision of the world, and Lenin’s accompanying argument for ‘the main enemy is at home’ on both sides, was false. It is that this was not obvious. The victory of the ‘social-chauvinist’ right wing of the international movement reflected partly state intervention: in Germany, for example, chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg offered the trade unions major concessions after the war in return for the war credits vote; this carrot was matched by the stick of repression of anti-war voices. But it also reflected the break-up of the left of the international, precisely because the nature of the war was not obvious.

1917-21

The appeal for the Communist International was issued on January 24 1919, for a meeting to start on March 2 - 14 months after the October revolution, just over a year after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Soviet government and just under a month after the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (Spartacists). Rosa Luxemburg had been hesitant about founding the KPD(S), wanting to pursue the struggle in the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) further; she was also doubtful about founding the Communist International, arguing that it was first necessary to have mass communist parties.17

Lenin and Zinoviev had been arguing for a split with the social-chauvinists as a necessity to reunite the international as a revolutionary organisation since 1915. Lenin proposed the call for a new international alongside that of changing the Bolsheviks’ name from ‘RSDLP (Majorityite)’ to ‘Communist’ on several occasions during the Russian Revolution. The renaming proposal was not accepted until the 8th special party congress on March 8 1918. Through February-October 1917 Lenin continued to grumble about the unwillingness of the party majority to break directly with the Zimmerwald ‘anti-war socialists’;18 but it was not until December 1918, after the outbreak of the German revolution, that concrete steps were taken towards a new international, as distinct from informal collaboration.

March 1919 also did not represent the end-point of the split. The KPD only acquired a mass character as the Unified Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) through fusion with the majority of the USPD in 1920.19 The Communist Party of France was created when the majority of the SFIO voted in December 1920 to join Comintern.20 The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was founded in May 1921, fusing several organisations round the core of a majority of the Czech Social Democratic Party, which had split that party (by holding a congress in defiance of the leadership) in September 1920.21 The Communist Party of Italy emerged in January 1921 when the majority of the Socialist Party, which had participated in Comintern in 1919-20, refused to expel its right wing under the 21 Conditions.22

Maybe someone who reads Russian could find out why the Bolshevik majority in 1917 refused, against Lenin, the open organisational split expressed in changing the organisation’s name to ‘Communist Party’, and persisted with attempts to work with the ‘Zimmerwald process’ (I do not have the necessary skills). But I think what we should learn from this is that the creation of new parties and new internationals needs not only the betrayal or collapse of the old, but also a sense of the existence of a real alternative.

In 1889 two models were on offer: the French ‘Possibilists’ and the British TUC’s broad-frontism; or the German SPD’s partyism. As of the 1890s, the SPD model was strong enough to create an international. As of 1915-17, the betrayal and collapse of the Second International was obvious enough. But what alternative? It was the October revolution, followed by the German, Austrian and Hungarian revolutions (and much more widespread revolutionary movements), which made the idea of a new international grip the minds of a sufficient section of the broad workers’ vanguard (that is, the movement’s activist layer that pays some degree of attention to politics) to become a material force.23 That is, unlike the many ‘oil-slick internationals’ created by Trotskyists, Left Communists and Maoists …

Tentatively, let me say that the origin of the simplified ‘standard narrative’ seems to be in the cult of the personality of Lenin. This was developed in Lenin’s last years because the lack of a broader body to which the Soviet government was effectively accountable meant that debates in the apparatus were forced to produce Lenin as a kind of monarch who took last-instance decisions.24 When Lenin was disabled, this produced a succession struggle and, especially after his death, expansion of the cult of the personality of Lenin - presenting him as the uniquely correct leader of Bolshevism rather than as one among a group of leaders - was developed as an instrument against the possible Bonapartism of Trotsky. After all, Trotsky the conciliator had been late in willingness to split, relative to Lenin and Zinoviev …

The price of this ‘standard narrative’ is, however, an undue willingness to split with small forces and without considering whether your split is one that can be clearly explained to the broad workers’ vanguard. On the contrary, the modern far left has tended to go for organisational separation and then attempt to speak directly to the masses in competition with the existing broad workers’ vanguard. This tendency has the effect of producing multiple organisations pursuing very similar goals, none of which will actually be taken seriously by the working class.

  1. RE Snow The Bolsheviks in Siberia, 1917-1918 Cranberry NJ 1977.↩︎

  2. London 1975 - translating La crisis del movimiento comunista: de la Komintern al Kominform Paris 1970.↩︎

  3. J Braunthal The history of the International, 1864-1914 (translated by H Collins and K Mitchell) London 1966, p198.↩︎

  4. Ibid pp249-54.↩︎

  5. M Taber (ed) Under the socialist banner: resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912 Chicago IL 2021, p62.↩︎

  6. Chicago IL 2023.↩︎

  7. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/index.htm.↩︎

  8. A convenient summary of his career is at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jaur%C3%A8s. Jaurès might well have, like Jules Guesde, responded to the German SPD vote for war credits by turning to supporting the French government; but this is a mere counter-factual.↩︎

  9. Eg. ‘Revisionism and nationalism’ (1915) www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1915/09/bernstein-ww1.htm; there are other pieces from 1915-16 in M Steger Selected writings of Eduard Bernstein 1900-1921 Highlands NJ 1996, chapters 13 and 14.↩︎

  10. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay_MacDonald.↩︎

  11. Mussolini: notorious, but more depth in R Drake Apostles and agitators: Italy’s Marxist revolutionary tradition Cambridge MA 2003, chapter 5. Labriola: D Marucco Arturo Labriola e il sindicalismo rivoliuzionario in Italia Turin 1970, chapter 10.↩︎

  12. B Lewis, ‘World War I: SPD left’s dirty secret’ Weekly Worker June 26 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1016/world-war-i-spd-lefts-dirty-secret); plus subsequent articles reprinting materials from the tendency; M Macnair, ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’ Critique Vol 42 (2014), pp353-75.↩︎

  13. M Salvadori Karl Kautsky and the socialist revolution (translated by J Rothschild) London 1979, pp182-83.↩︎

  14. Die Befreiung der Nationen Stuttgart 1917 (reprint, Leopold Classic Library); Serbien und Belgien in der Geschichte Stuttgart 1917.↩︎

  15. Wie der Weltkrieg entstand Berlin 1919, translated (anonymously) as The guilt of William Hohenzollern London 1919 (reprint, Forgotten Books 2012).↩︎

  16. See note 12.↩︎

  17. J Riddell (ed) The German revolution and the debate on soviet power New York 1986, pp157-58 (KPD), pp454-56 (Comintern; Hugo Eberlein reporting a conversation three days before her murder).↩︎

  18. Seventh party congress: R Gregor (ed) Resolutions and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Vol 2, The early soviet period 1917-1929 Toronto 1974, p49; Lenin’s grumbles on the international question: Collected Works Vols 24-26 at various points (it is a peculiarity of the US SWP’s Communist International in Lenin’s time series that volume 1 of Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary international (New York 1984) ends in December 1916, while volume 2, The German revolution and the debate on soviet power (New York 1986) begins in November 1918).↩︎

  19. B Lewis and LT Lih (ed and trans) Martov and Zinoviev: head to head in Halle London 2011.↩︎

  20. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tours_Congress.↩︎

  21. CIA report, The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1960), www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-00915R001200140002-1.pdf, pp3-5.↩︎

  22. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Communist_Party. The section, ‘History’, begins with a convenient summary. R Drake Apostles and agitators (see note 11 above), chapters 6 (Bordiga) and 7 (Gramsci) has more detail. D Broder, ‘Theatre of revolution’ Weekly Worker May 20 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1348/theatre-of-revolution), among other issues criticises those modern liberal authors who blame the split for the victory of fascism.↩︎

  23. “…  theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”: K Marx, ‘Abstract from the introduction to contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right’ (1844): www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm.↩︎

  24. L Douds Inside Lenin’s government London 2018.↩︎